History & Heritage Lecture Series

Community Center Auditorium

4:30pm

The goal of the History & Heritage lecture series is to explore historical places, understand significant historical events, and learn about the lives of men and women in different times and places. As philosopher George Santayana said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Nathaniel Philbrick, New York Times Best-Selling Author

Speaking on his most recent book, Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold and the Fate of the American Revolution

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

What if Benedict Arnold’s treason was not an act that split the nation but instead was the glue that bound it together and saved it? After four years of war, America is forced to realize that the real threat to its liberties might not come from without but from within. Valiant Ambition is a complex, controversial, and dramatic portrait of a people in crisis and the war that gave birth to a nation. It is a surprising account of the middle years of the American Revolution, and the tragic relationship between George Washington and Benedict Arnold. Photo by: Kit Noble

Candice Shy Hooper, Historian and Author

Speaking on her book, Lincoln’s Generals’ Wives: Four Women Who Influenced the Civil War – For Better and for Worse

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Hooper’s book illuminates the profound impact of military wives on the Civil War by examining the lives of Jessie Fremont, Nelly McClellan, Ellen Sherman, and Julia Grant. America’s leading Lincoln scholar, Harold Holzer, said of the book, “There are fresh, revealing, well-crafted portraits of women who not only helped propel their husbands to major military careers, but established themselves, for better or worse, as formidable battlers in their own right.” Using the couples’ letters, memoirs, and photographs, along with new maps that follow the women’s travels during the war, Hooper reveals a hidden chapter of Civil War history. Photo by: Andrea Hillebrand

George Goodwin, Historian and Author in Residence, Benjamin Franklin House in London

Speaking on his book, Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of America’s Founding Father

Monday, March 27, 2017

As said in a literary review of George Goodwin’s book, “There are three Benjamin Franklins; the American, the British, and the French. The first and last are famous, the second forgotten.” Goodwin has offered fascinating perspective into that second Franklin through this lively, moving, and finely textured account of Franklin’s years in London. Goodwin provides a thoroughly researched chronicle of the transformation from provincial lobbyist to risk–taking revolutionary. Join Benjamin Franklin at home with his landlady Mrs. Stevenson and her delightful daughter Polly. Meet him at St. Paul’s coffee house and within the grand houses of contending political peers. Accompany him on summer travels, whether to Scotland and Ireland, or across the channel to Continental Europe. Goodwin will take you on a riveting, historical journey of the British life of America’s Founding Father. As an added bonus, attendees of this lecture will receive a copy of Benjamin Franklin in London personally signed by author George Goodwin (gift applies to one book per couple). Photo by: Cecily Goodwin